Well, I've been going to this Vietnamese temple for about half a year now and I've managed to pick up a number of phrases in Vietnamese, but I guess I just haven't been able to find the resources to do a lot of accurate translating "in bulk."

I've acquired a book that appears to be a sutra collection, but I can't really get a grasp on what is written. Google Translate is not particularly helpful in this case, and I think the people at the temple are far too busy to help me translate it page by page (and I really would feel bad asking).

Just to demonstrate what I'm getting from Google Translate (selected at random):

Nam mô a rị da, bà lô kiết đế, thước bàn ra dạ, ta bà ha.

Turns into:

Male model a ri, three fetters lot to the table size stomach, she ha.

The above is not even necessarily the strangest result I've gotten from a similar sample size... for instance, the word for Dharma (Pháp) will nearly always translate as "France" unless I put the word for Buddha (Phât) immediately prior to it. *confused* Oddly, this is almost never how I see it used in the book I have, but I sincerely doubt we're chanting about France for an hour. LOL

Clearly I'm missing a lot of context on how the words are used in Vietnamese...

Is a printed Vietnamese to English dictionary going to be any more accurate, or is that exactly the sort of material that Google Translate is pulling it's results from?

Oddly, resources in Pali / English translation are far more easy to come by than Vietnamese / English, so there really isn't any particular shortage of teachings I'm able to read, but I'd really love to get more out of my time at temple, even if it is only through private study afterward.

I suppose that is a huge part of the problem for me, as I had no idea they were "porting" Sanskrit into the mix (I have studied no Sanskrit, only Pali, so I have no frame of reference to even start to realize that on my own).

Without knowing that, I would have had no idea that this was likely part of a mantra.

In case you have future matters on language/translation, there's a subforum for language where any language/translation expert can assist you further there. As the subforum states on the main page: This is a space for inquiries about various languages, translations, or anything else related to language.

plwk wrote:In case you have future matters on language/translation, there's a subforum for language where any language/translation expert can assist you further there. As the subforum states on the main page: This is a space for inquiries about various languages, translations, or anything else related to language.

Thanks. I think I put it here because the temple is associated with Pure Land, but I suppose that would have been more appropriate.